“ Hurt” by Johnny Cash. Now I love many types of artists, but my relationship with Johnny goes back to childhood when my Mom ordered some song collection from Reader’s Digest because she’s been trying to win that sweepstakes for decades. She even puts her hair into rollers the night before Ed McMahon is due to deliver her check. Anyway, she got this cassette and I was unimpressed with it except for Johnny Cash singing “ A Boy Named Sue.” I had never heard the song before that moment and I took the family’s cassette recorder into my bed and played it, and played it, over and over, every day. It reconfirmed my desire to be a singer one day and it inspired me to write my own song. Following you will find, for the first time ever in the history of written words, the lyrics to the first (but not the last) song I ever wrote.
“You Didn’t Care For Me”
Well I’ll tell you a story that I happen to know
It’s about you and me and we were walking in the snow,
You fell down and you broke your toe
I carried you back, you never thanked me for that, you didn’t care for me
Dun Da Da Da!
There was a second verse about me and his brother but I think you’ve suffered enough. I practiced singing in my room and finally got up the courage to sing my song to my sister Maria. When I was finished she fell on the floor laughing and looked up at me and said, “I’m laughing so hard I have tears running down my eyeballs.” When I pointed out to her that tears were running down her face, NOT her eyeballs, she laughed even harder. Unfortunately she remembers this story and proudly retells it as the funniest song she ever heard, hands down.
When I was in kindergarten returning from Christmas break we had to draw a picture of what we did over the holiday. I drew a picture of a tall fizzing glass of an amber liquid and a few potato chips floating next to it. The teacher or one of the volunteer Moms would come around, ask us what the picture depicted and then write it across the bottom of the paper for us. I proudly told the Mom helper that for Christmas and New Years we had beer and potato chips in the living room. She laughed and said, “You mean your parents had beer.”
“No, we all had beer.” I assured her.
The teacher was notified and after school when my Mom arrived and the teacher got to her she showed her the “deeply concerning” art I’d drawn. My Mom turned as red as a ruby and told the teacher that our glasses were filled with 7 UP with just a splash of beer on top and that it was a holiday tradition she had brought to this country from Australia.
I thought I was in trouble, but my Mom told the story to all of her friends and family, minus my Dad, and everyone laughed their heads off at my picture. Recently I asked my brother, the oldest of us four and the one with a good memory, if I was just crazy, or did our parents give us beer as small children? He said that they did, but that it was a cultural thing because my Mom had grown up drinking Shandys.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Johnny Cash. My Mom finally took the tape from me because I wouldn’t stop playing it and/or singing it. Now I can listen to it and remember the pure joy of a song I thought was so clever, and still do.
P.S.
To Jane Doe #4 , good for you for getting the fuck out of there and not suffering through another minute of that sick bastard forcing sex on you.
Comment by leonardo
November 22, 2006 @ 5:01 am
Tammy, I’ve always liked that shot of Johnny Cash because, along with the uniqueness of his style and voice, the delivery of his songs, it symbolized for me his independence; the feeling you got from him that, “this is what I do and how I do it … you don’t like it? … get the hell outta here”!
Your revelation of the connection between “A Boy Named Sue” and the inspiration to write your own song, “You Didn’t Care For Me” is hilarious. Yet, underlying that is the connection you have with your sister, a sharing of childhood memories that’ll last a lifetime, something that seals your togetherness when adult life can and will take you two in different directions … a base to fall back on.
Your “splash of beer” story reminds me a lot of my childhood, when growing up in a large Italian family, during the big holiday meals, it was a common thing to sit on my grandfather’s lap and share home-made wine with him. The only thing is that his glass was the full-powered stuff while my glass contained mostly cream soda with a “splash of wine” on top to give it color. Again, a family memory that will always keep me close to my long-gone grandfather and those family gatherings. However, I wasn’t smart enough, as you were, to draw a picture for the teacher so Grandpa was never questioned by the school authorities. Good thing, because he spoke only Italian and knew very few words in English.